Seven Minutes Past Seven

TW: Child loss and strong themes of grief



The room was silent as the midwives and doctors paused.

“What!? What’s wrong? Where is my baby!?” Mallory was breathless, her words were shaky as she cried out for the son she’d just birthed.

Her hair was soaked in sweat after a gruelling 19 hour labour and her lower body tingled with the sensation of numbness. Her heart threw itself at her ribs as the silence grew louder.

“What!?” her eyes darted from person to person.

She lifted her head, and the top of her chest tightened as her eyes found her son; surrounded by nurses in the right of the room he had tubes and hands all over his tiny little body.

             “Stop! What are you doing to him!?” the tightness was travelling up her throat.

Fingers pushed hard on the babies chest and suction was in between his bluing lips. The silence grew deafening as he was rushed out of the room. Mallory’s eyes were wide under her creased brows, and terror reared it’s bitter head at the top of her throat. Her stomach twisted sharply, and she felt fear kicking her insides just as her son had.

“Where are they taking him!? Where are you going! Owen where are they taking him!?” Mallory screamed after her son, her wet eyes glared up at her fiancée, he was pale, and his eyes shared the same fear as her own.

She tried to get up, but she couldn’t feel her legs, she could only look at the open doorway. She felt the sweaty hand of Owen on her shoulder as they both watched the terribly empty hallway, anticipating their newborn’s return.

Mallory’s eyes switched from the door to the clock and back again. The hands on the clock had moved seven painstakingly slow numbers before the new parents received any word on their baby boy.

Soft footsteps entered the room and swaddled in a blue fleece blanket was their son – for a second everything was perfect.

The nurses face as she stood by the bed was stiff and pale. She gently lifted the corner of blanket from over the baby’s face and Mallory felt Owens stomach drop to his feet while her own felt like it was being squeezed by an unforgiving hand.

“We did everything we could – ” a mix of sympathy and guilt filled the woman’s eyes as she handed Owen their son, “and I’m so sorry, but your sons time of death was 19:07.”

A gut wrenching cry pushed itself out of Mallory with such force she nearly threw up. Passed the terror in her throat and out from her shaking mouth, her wailing sob was raspy as she buried her face into Owen and pleaded.

“My baby, not my baby!” she cried over and over into her partner, he rested his head on hers as they cried, clutching their dead son.

The tightness in Mallory’s chest and stomach had been swapped out for what was now a throbbing ache, her chest pulsed with each beat of her heart – the heart in which had been punctured so deeply it wore a gaping hole in the shape of her son. She could feel every beat, like each thud took something out of the rest of her weary, postpartum body.

She reached for her baby and stifled her cries as not to scare him; he was so perfect, but his little body was so still. His skin was soft as Mallory ran the back of her fingers down his tiny cheek, his eyes were closed, sealed by a wet fluid and his precious little lips were a deep purple. Mallory pressed a finger to them.

    “Hey baby,” she whispered, breathless, “hi beautiful boy.”

Her voice wavered as she curled her quivering lips into a thin line and swallowed her tears, her jaw ached with how tightly she had it clenched.

The warm hand of Owen held baby boy’s head, it fit just right in his palm.

“Welcome to the world Flynn” he stroked his sons hair with his thumb, careful not to wake him.

The exhaustion was too much, Mallory’s body was trembling, and her cries had become voiceless wheezes. Her eyes were swollen and puffed from her stinging tear ducts now waterless and red. She closed her eyes and let herself dissolve into numbness. She felt Owen crawl into the bed with them and rest his head next to Flynn. The thermostat was turned down to keep their still little boy comfortable.

Their baby was dead. His death certificate sat under his birth certificate, an hour in between the two, both awaiting signatures. Flynn Rustyn Morris-Olsen: 18:03 – 19:07.

“It’s time,” the words fell from the nurses tongue as gently as she could manage.

It had only been a matter of minutes since they were handed their son but the light outside said otherwise.

The cold of the room seeped into Mallory’s bones as the bassinet next to their bed was packed down and the flowers and teddy bears with their congratulations cards were taken out of the room. She sat motionless in the middle of it all clutching the blue fleece blanket, that still smelt of baby boy, close to her face.

She arrived with a baby and was now leaving without one, all she had was the fleece he was wrapped in for a few hours and the wrecked body he was grown in for 240 days. It was a loss words would never amount to.

A silent tear escaped her weary eye, and she bit the inside of her cheek to remind herself this nightmare was reality.

The nursery her and Owen had spent the last seven months intricately constructing had never felt so desolate – the lump in Mallory’s throat hadn’t shrunk and the hand gripping her stomach hadn’t loosened. Walking through the doorway of her son’s room she was engulfed by its emptiness.

Collapsing into the hardwood she screamed out for her baby and curled herself into a bleeding, lactating ball on his bedroom floor. She gripped her hands around her knees as she rocked back and forth, her cries turning into soft sobs in the shape of her baby’s name.

His walls were wrapped in woodland creatures and his cot stood alone on the left side of the room made with sheets he would never sleep on. The flowers and toys from the hospital sat quietly on his change table and dresser, just another reminder he was never coming home.

Mallory lay breathless and shaking, the tremors turned her cries into dry, open-mouthed moans. Her hands made their way to her stomach, her soft and swollen abdomen bled into the diaper she was put in by the nurses. In both hands she held the loose skin left by her baby, she tightened her grip, digging her nails into the flesh and screaming. She wanted to reach up inside herself and rip out whatever it was that killed her perfect little boy. She wanted to burn the stitches and tear them out one by one, anything to alleviate the pain her heart was in.

She couldn’t bare it.

The flowers and cards tormented her, their vibrancy and life were a stark contrast to the rest of the silent room. The inside of Mallory’s chest filled with a heating sensation that bubbled under her sternum. She felt the warmth spread to her stomach and up the hackles of her neck, it forced her hands into fists and her teeth to grind aggressively. She rubbed her fingers against the inside of her palm as the heat within her sparked a raging inferno.

Mallory flung herself at the gifts and without a moment of rationality, threw each one off of their podium. She grasped the knobs of the wooden dresser beneath them and hurled drawers full of blue baby clothes across the room. The drawer itself became a missile as it plummeted into the plaster and toppled to the floor. She reached out and grabbed the framed photos off the wall above, the ones that held each ultrasound of baby, and with a disgruntled scream, lobbed them straight into the ground at her feet. The glass shattered in tiny fragments across the floorboards and under the crib. Her fingers gripped the hooks that held the frames and wrenched them from the beam they’d been nestled in, with them went the woodland wallpaper.

She tore at the paper and shredded the feature wall to pieces leaving nothing but a few specks of it in patches across the bare plaster. She tugged the fresh sheets out of the cot and threw them down into the turmoil on the floor along with the cushions off of the rocking chair in the corner and everything on the shelving overhead.

Mallory crumbled down into a heap within her mess, sobbing more dry tears of everything she’d never felt before. She curled herself back into a ball, clutching the blue fleece blanket to her chest as she rocked back and forth, crying her baby’s name softly under her breath.

She felt the warmth of Owen surround her as he curled up with her on their baby boy’s bedroom floor.